Here we go again: Glasper on the problem with "Jazz"

[Mike Schwartz]

Reminds me quite a bit of this....Yogi Berra on Jazz:

Interviewer: Yogi, can you explain jazz?

Yogi: I can't, but I will.... 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, its right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it's wrong.

Interviewer: I don't understand.

Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.

Interviewer: Do you understand it?

Yogi: No. That's why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn't know anything about it.

Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?

Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead.

Interviewer: What is syncopation?

Yogi: That's when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don't hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they're the same as something different from those other kinds.

Interviewer: Now I really don't understand.

Yogi: I haven't taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.

[Morganized]

Playing the aggrieved victim viz. the establishment suggests a kind of insecurity about straying from his jazz background.

Or else it suggests a kind of savvy about how the media works, and that when you say X, you get "good coverage".

These "controversies" about who likes what and why is a consensual game played by press and, more and more frequently, musicians alike, with the only goal being to gain profile which will then, hopefully, result in more product being moved, be it rock, paper, or schizzers.

Matthew Shipp has his press rap down to a science, and it appears that Glasper's is developing likewise, get a theme or two, variate it as needed, and always throw in a little stray fresh info for freshness.

Anybody think that Marc Meyers is gonna put a Robert Glasper piece in the WSJ where the focus is on what kind of clothes he prefers, what movies he's been checking out, anything but the "upstart rebel hip-(h)(b)opster bucking the jazz establishment" angle? What would that look like, the world in which that even becomes an option? Some day, but not to day.

Cogs, that's all this is, cogs. The cogs of business. WSJ needs a cog (although why is still beyond me), Mark Myers needs a cog, Robert Glasper needs a cog, so together they all got their cogs. Win-win, especially if some suckers read it and think it matters, that cogs do more than coggify.

FWI I still dig "Searchin" a BIG bunch of lots, although Boyz II Men was after my prime®(est) time. No biggie.

No, it's a mess. There's also this curious boomeranging dead-end bit of logic: "Jazz has become too closed off ... the one and only way it can be saved is by doing this one thing that I am doing"

I have nothing to add....already been said.... I agree

[Quasimado]

If a musician gets an interview w/a major media outlet and then doesn't say anything, does a tree fall in the woods anyway?

Hopefully it falls on Phil Woods.

Still, the cat could play. The Bud Powell at Birdland '57 is evidence of that.

Q

[AllenLowe]

new developments: Mulatto Radio.

film at 11.

[John Litweiler]

The obvious comparison to me would be M-Base. I fail to see how he's not doing more or less the same thing 25 years later, or how this won't look like that in 25 more years.

What I heard of Glasper at last summer's Chicago Jazz Festival sounded like amateur 1970s fusion music with a rapper added.

[AllenLowe]

exactly; I've been struck with how corny the stuff is.

[robertoart]

The obvious comparison to me would be M-Base. I fail to see how he's not doing more or less the same thing 25 years later, or how this won't look like that in 25 more years.

What I heard of Glasper at last summer's Chicago Jazz Festival sounded like amateur 1970s fusion music with a rapper added.

What the music actually sounds like to a bunch of old White farts and what the music actually means to the musicians and those that are part of their environment are two different things. Glasper is conscious of young Black audiences, so a smooth Jazz Fusion sound and rapping are not out of sync. The conceptual aspect is not just about aesthetic form but environmental/situational context.

[AllenLowe]

uh, Freelancer, I am a musician and I come from that environment, whatever that is. You can come up with all the sociological jargon you want in order to defend it, all from that course Conextualization and Gender Maladjustment 101, but it's still really bad music.

Edited November 24, 2013 by AllenLowe

[.:.impossible]

I'm not a fan, but I am friends with some guys forty and under, purely hip hop. R&B, with an interest in jazz for samples who really love the Glasper thing.

I know that I am farther aware from the popular opinion than they are. I'd prefer your music Allen. They wouldn't last a minute.

Different strokes.

[.:.impossible]

I'm not a fan, but I am friends with some guys forty and under, purely hip hop. R&B, with an interest in jazz for samples who really love the Glasper thing.

I know that I am farther aware from the popular opinion than they are. I'd prefer your music Allen. They wouldn't last a minute.

Different strokes.

For what it's worth, I also have a few friends, jazz musicians if you have to categorize them, early to mid twenties, who also seem to dig the Glasper thing. They have recently been involved with recording sessions with Nicholas Payton. I sort of why away from the subject.

For what it's worth, this group of friends would probably like what you do just fine.

For what it's worth.

[uli]

What the music actually sounds like to a bunch of old White farts and what the music actually means to the musicians and those that are part of their environment are two different things. Glasper is conscious of young Black audiences, so a smooth Jazz Fusion sound and rapping are not out of sync. The conceptual aspect is not just about aesthetic form but environmental/situational context.

That's Chris Dave on drums! This old White farte digs the drumhedz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkgiuczqGI

The guitar players name is Sharkey not Shakey.

Edited November 24, 2013 by uli

[JSngry]

whoa...have not heard these Drumhedz before...will remedy that ASAP.

[robertoart]

uh, Freelancer, I am a musician and I come from that environment, whatever that is. You can come up with all the sociological jargon you want in order to defend it, all from that course Conextualization and Gender Maladjustment 101, but it's still really bad music.

Really!

you've actually got some currency with the Jazz/hip-hop thing.

I always thought Allen Lowe and Groove were two!

To paraphrase a Woody Allen line.

Edited November 24, 2013 by freelancer

[robertoart]

I'm not a fan, but I am friends with some guys forty and under, purely hip hop. R&B, with an interest in jazz for samples who really love the Glasper thing.

I know that I am farther aware from the popular opinion than they are. I'd prefer your music Allen. They wouldn't last a minute.

Different strokes.

For what it's worth, I also have a few friends, jazz musicians if you have to categorize them, early to mid twenties, who also seem to dig the Glasper thing. They have recently been involved with recording sessions with Nicholas Payton. I sort of why away from the subject.

For what it's worth, this group of friends would probably like what you do just fine.

For what it's worth.

What the music actually sounds like to a bunch of old White farts and what the music actually means to the musicians and those that are part of their environment are two different things. Glasper is conscious of young Black audiences, so a smooth Jazz Fusion sound and rapping are not out of sync. The conceptual aspect is not just about aesthetic form but environmental/situational context.

That's Chris Dave on drums! This old White farte digs the drumhedz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QkgiuczqGI

The guitar players name is Sharkey not Shakey.

Yeah, thats some really bad Fusion.

[JSngry]

Looks like all you gotta do to get a free Chris Dave joint/sampler/mixtape/compilation/promo-discwhatever (23 tunes, 66 minutes} is agree to receive the newsletter. http://chris-dave.com/download-drumhedz-mixtape/

[robertoart]

This was posted on the board sometime ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39ZaFT1kA0

[.:.impossible]

I saw an ad for a Blue Note Anniversary concert. The two headliners are ROBERT GLASPER/JASON MORAN.

The first time I read that, I couldn't help but think "Jason Moran will cut him to shreds."

I also realize that music is not a competition. I just wonder why they would do that to their cash cow.

[AllenLowe]

actually, Freelancer, I just recorded with DJ Logic. So now I got street cred.

to quote Gig Young, "no gap here."

[.:.impossible]

No offense to either of you, but I don't think DJ Logic has much street cred. Maybe in the parking lot of a jam band concert.

[Noj]

I'm never concerned if the music is new or old. That's always someone else's concern. So I don't know what someone's talking about when they say certain music represents "grandma's tastes." That's not the right sort of listening. Two kinds of music and all that.

Roy Ayers might be a hero to the younger hip hop/R&B/neo soul/whatever crowd, but as much as I enjoy some of it none of them have made anything as hip as Roy Ayers did in his prime.

That Glasper cites Boys II Men as an influence might partially explain his shortcomings. They were crap. Mingus is hip and will always be hip.

None of the manufactured, synthesized, music-played-to-sound-as-if-it-were-a-sample sounds as good as a sample. Hip hop will never be as great as it was when it indiscriminately yanked noises and bits from as many records as possible. The greatest rap albums of all time had countless rough clips and creative turntablism to support the rhymes. It won't ever be as good as that unless they give up trying to make some slick studio record for money and make an illegal record that flips a middle finger to the record companies and their sample police.

[mikeweil]

Me thinks these guys are just recapitulating what has been innovated since, roughly, 1970, just like the earlier young lions did with the stuff between 1940 and 1960. Let's wait and see what they develop from it. Right now they're just recreating, with a much higher level of technical proficiency. That's okay, but doesn't move me (or "rock my world") as much as the originals.

As for Glasper, I find his collage method of mixing different musical influences is rather superficial. I think you got to know the tradition a little better than just picking up some things and throw them together. I find Jason Moran has a lot more depth and a much broader horizon.

Just my two cents, of course.

[xybert]

None of the manufactured, synthesized, music-played-to-sound-as-if-it-were-a-sample sounds as good as a sample. Hip hop will never be as great as it was when it indiscriminately yanked noises and bits from as many records as possible. The greatest rap albums of all time had countless rough clips and creative turntablism to support the rhymes.

This is such a good point. Real magic can result from creative sampling in hip hop, a certain something that i can't get from any other type of music. It's funny that i always found hip hop groups with live instrumentation to be lacking somehow, when you would think it would be the opposite. I never saw the point in a band that didn't have to deal with the inherent limitations of sampling confining themselves to imitating looped samples.

[AllenLowe]

no gap here.

[robertoart]

no gap here.

no gap here.

What these guys are doing and what you do are a million miles away from each other, culturally and formally. Not so much a gap as a chasm.

Did you get to chew the fat with DJ Logic much. Or just hand him the cheque?

Edited November 25, 2013 by freelancer